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UW Professor: The Information War Is Real, and We're Losing It (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange. Too strange for a university professor to take seriously. "There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing," Starbird told me the other day in her office. "It was real tinfoil-hat stuff. So we ignored it." Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by "crisis actors" for political purposes. "After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity," Starbird says. "It was so fringe we kind of laughed at it. "That was a terrible mistake. We should have been studying it." Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these "strange clusters" of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach. There are dozens of conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots. Starbird is in the UW's Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering -- the study of the ways people and technology interact. Her team analyzed 58 million tweets sent after mass shootings during a 10-month period. They searched for terms such as "false flag" and "crisis actor," web slang meaning a shooting is not what the government or the traditional media is reporting it to be. Then she analyzed the content of each site to try to answer the question: Just what is this alternative media ecosystem saying? Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we've built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor. "Your brain tells you 'Hey, I got this from three different sources,'" Starbird says. "But you don't realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn't know how to vaccinate for it." The report goes on to say that "Starbird says she's concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward 'the menace of unreality -- which is that nobody believes anything anymore.'"
Thank goodness the 1% has people like Kate Starbird, targeting those seeking the real story.
What's next? Words like "false flag" (or PizzaGate) become verbotten?
Really? We are there.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
usually a short story.. language of the heart is foolproof... cease fire stand down... that's the spirit..
..."After every mass shooting, ...
Most of it was to distract from the fact that all of those people bought their guns legally and used them for these terrorist acts.
And there was the talk of "Obama taking our guns." that went around for 8 years and caused guns prices and gun manufacturer's stock prices to sky rocket.
The theme? Paranoid guns rights activists.
He didn't make a political statement but you completely verified his point. Must of picked on one of your truther sites I guess.
Unless I missed something, the University of Washington is not anywhere near Boston.
Next they will be saying that Bowling Green was a fake.
the more you should look around that somebody.
RECALL: THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED
Your brain tells you 'Hey, I got this from three different sources,'" Starbird says. "But you don't realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn't know how to vaccinate for it." The report goes on to say that "Starbird says she's concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward 'the menace of unreality -- which is that nobody believes anything anymore.
Over the past 20 years I've felt this as well. It's scary, because for those of us used to seeking out signal in the noise, it just encourages apathy. We look around and feel like we're surrounded by idiots, when it may only in fact be just a bunch of bots propagating a single crazy person's mindless steam of consciousness.
Rational, fact/observation-based debate becomes just exhausting, and we say "whatever." That's not good.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I think that those conspiracy theories that are propagated by more than the usual crackpots may be a result of people realizing just how much fake news, biased news and "opinion pieces" there are in the mainstream media.
They overshoot the goal and now see fake news everywhere even when in some cases there are none.
Well, if watching the University of California over the last decade hasn't made this clear: universities are becoming rapidly fascist. It looks like this UDub professor is on the verge of arguing for thought police. Remember, there is no vaccination for this virus. Her words, not mine.
So if what you are telling me is true, and it all traces to one place, then someone is purposely spreading this false information. ITS A GODDAMN FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG! THESE ARE DOUBLE AGENT CRISIS ACTORS WORKING FOR THE WORLD BANKING POWERS!!
I saw this fake news a lot. Deliberately helped along with politicians dubious, wooly language about them. ("I don't recall / I can't verify that / if they are real / etc")
"Liberals are always wrong and only I'm right. Liberals shouldn't bother doing or sharing research because they are by definition wrong."
Without critical thought people will accept many things that are just shoveled at them. Admittedly critical thought requires practice and is hard.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
This guy is 1) A professor, and 2) in Boston - ergo, he's probably extremely liberal (how'd I know???)
Not everyone is losing the information war. Just your side.
It's kind of a shame that you would really think that. Confirmation bias and gullibility are not monopolized by one side of a political divide. Anyone who thinks they are always correct and clear-eyed, is simply wrong.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
It makes you look dumb, but it makes you feel smart.
If you earnestly believe one of these ridiculous conspiracies, like the flat earth guys or something, then you feel like you're in on this big secret that nobody knows about. All those fools running around in their daily lives have no idea that the sun above their head is hanging from a string, but I do! I'm so much smarter than all of them!
It makes you feel as though you are smarter than everyone around you. And some people DESPERATELY want to feel that they are smarter than everyone around them.
But not badly enough that they'll go out & actually learn things. No, that takes effort.
Yes, the example stories provided are crazy and no one should believe them. So what should we believe? Not the government, which lies about really, really big important things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, etc. Not the news media (owned by the same conglomerates that own the politicians) which thinks "unnamed sources believe Trump may or may not have had contact with someone who might have bought one of those silly Russian fur hats once" is worth a 10 minute segment with 5 panelists yapping. And who also repeatedly told us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So, yes, there are bad people lying or crazy people hallucinating all kinds of nutty things. But they'd have no purchase if the "trustworthy" people in media and government weren't already doing the same thing.
This reminds of the joke "don't steal! The government hates the competition." Don't lie! The government hates the competition.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
This is not new, it's been going on for years with monied lobbyists creating fake news reported accidentally on TV.
Then the fake news became sponsored news on TV as TV accepted the money to run the show.
Then entire fake news propaganda stations were created with the purpose of earning that money and showing that propaganda.
The debunking of this crap is also out there, but there isn't the money promoting it. e.g. the black people attack car with trump sticker was only debunked because someone in the block spotted the camera crew and filmed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtjVkAZky4
The blacks attack car video was run on Fox News, the debunk video was not.
Not being able to spell "losing" is bad. Not being able to spell it when it's in the bloody headline you just read, that's a whole other level of stupid.
This is a side effect of 9-11 and the following globalist wars. Two planes, three towers followed by the 7 Countries in 5 Years Wars.
What else could be fake?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUCwCgthp_E
At least read the first sentence or two in the summary. This 'guy' is named Kate.
The worrying part is that what has so often been labeled as "bullshit" ends up being true.
Ten or twenty years ago, anyone claiming that mass monitoring/recording of communications was taking place was labeled as a "kook", a "crazy", and "conspiracy theorist", or what have you.
Then we have the Snowden and Assange revelations which verify what was claimed by these supposed "kooks", and in some ways go beyond what was originally believed.
I'm sure you can fall back on the "a broken clock is right twice a day" idea, or even claim that they were accidentally right.
But the focus shouldn't be on the alleged "kooks" and their claims; it should be on how the truth was wrongly labeled as "bullshit".
Of course people will start to distrust official sources when the "truth" so often ends up being shown to be "bullshit", and the alleged "bullshit" ends up being true.
"WE" are not losing. Only people without sufficient knowledge to have a properly functioning bullshit detector, and those too lazy to do any proper research are losing. If you're too lazy to do some fact checking, you've actively turned yourself into a sucker and deserve everything you get. Maybe when you're been fooled / scammed often enough, the lesson will sink in.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Please don't assume anyone's gender. It's 2017, after all. It's routine for men to have vaginas, and for women to have penises, especially within academic settings. Your best bet is to use gender-neutral pronouns like 'zer' and to never assume somebody's gender based on zer name.
This is the liberal media that thought it would be a good idea to run with a story about how President Trump is into watersports and hires Russian prostitutes to piss on beds once slept in by the Obamas, despite the fact that it was completely unverified and unverifiable.
What goes around comes around. Maybe its time for some introspection on the part of traditional media. People want honest reporting, and if they can't get it, they will go for the crazy stuff that confirms their biases.
But it needs to go a step farther. Lies spread by the millennial fringe and the left are just as much lies as anyone else's lies. It can't be one sided, the dems and progressives (especially silicon valley, and millennials in CA and NY) astroturf with the best of them. She would have nothing to fear if we taught personal responsibility and ethical accountability again and people prized real values over greed and power grabbing. A plot like this can't work if people take control of their minds and don't buy into it in the first place. We are lazy creatures. Truly, there is something wrong with *US*.
Prolly because he's on the winning side, tbh. Maybe you should consider your own advice?
Shadow bot networks? Alternative ecosystems? Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Well, the problem is that after " you've actively turned yourself into a sucker and deserve everything you get." this starts to afect the rest of us. How? Simple, even those suckers have a right to vote and then troubles begin to start...
Part of the issue here is that people have become aware of the manipulation of public opinion by intelligence agencies. We have things like Operation Gladio, in which the CIA teamed up with people on post-war Europe to clandestinely fight the Soviets, which included bombings and assassinations which were blamed on the communists. We have the revelation of Operation Northwoods, approved by the then Joint Chiefs of Staff, that would have blown up dummy airplanes and blamed it on Cuba. The plan was squashed by Kennedy and McNamara, but the fact that it existed and was approved is concerning. We have the revelations of the Church Committee, which among other things revealed that the CIA had operatives working at all major news networks. They claim to have ceased that type of thing. But does anyone really believe we have effective and complete oversight of the CIA?
None of this justifies thinking that any given event, like the Boston Marathon bombing, or the Sandy Hook shootings are false flag operations, or anything other than what they seem. But once you realize that it is possible that there is a plan in place to manipulate public opinion, it can be hard to know what to believe anymore. And once you don't really trust the mainstream news sources, you start to look for alternatives. Many of those alternatives are not very good! But where do you go when you suspect that ABC (for example) might just be telling you what those in power want you to believe? Couple that with that fact that most news organizations rely solely on "official sources" and don't do much actual investigating, and you realize that such manipulation is quite possible. It can be very disconcerting and confusing.
I think there are a number of factors in play with this issue. Part of it is gullibility and paranoia. But it also stems from the fact that covert actors have used trusted news sources for propaganda and manipulation, and in doing so have damaged the reputation and trustworthiness of those outlets.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Properly functioning bullshit detectors are a matter of training in an environment conducive to developing one. If you do not have an environment where you can check facts, you cannot develop an instinct for who's shoveling turd and you cannot develop research skills. If you are surrounded by people in a similar situation, you're prone to develop your own dissembling skills as a survival mechanism, rather than an appreciation of honesty. You have to have something to get your footing on. In other words it is down to proper education, environment, and mentoring, not laziness.
If the neighborhood next door has a long-term infestation of head lice that just won't subside, do you do something to help them out of it, or just sit on your porch saying "look at all those dirty people."?
The answer should be the latter, if not for moral reasons, then for the fact that the consequences may occasionally spill out onto you.
Someone had to do it.
I don't even trust NPR anymore. You can clearly hear the bias in their tone of voice and choice of words. It's as if the news isn't just about the news anymore -- now it's equally about the newscaster. It's like they're supposed to be an actual character in the story. The bias may not have been deliberate, but over the past decade or two there has clearly been a cultural trend towards being more "animated", and this has poured over into what used to be unbiased news. What they don't realize is that "being animated" inevitably means "showing bias".
It wasn't enough to simply report the news - to fill 24 hours of programming "news" agencies had to throw their opinions into the mix as well.
Opinions, by their very nature cause division. Eventually you will push enough people away from your narrative and you will lose the information war.
If the mainstream media is honestly and truly concerned with winning the information war they need to bring back old school journalism. Only publish if you can get two reliable sources to corroborate a story and NEVER give your own damn opinion on the matter. Do that for the next 5 years and you might just get the respect you once had.
This last election cycle turned me away from all national TV news. Local news is as close as you can get to unbiased news and even then you need to be skeptical.
The concept of rumors and false information disseminated across the world isn't new ("I've heard she's a witch"). The concept of false narrative driving major social and political decisions isn't new (the entire religion thing anywhere, basically). Technology simply makes it more convenient by giving voice to millions of idiots who theretofore were limited to only their immediate surroundings.
CTs are predictable. Basically, the bad guys in them are always agents of establishment, and establishment allegedly has a secret agenda.
Whenever anything bad happens in public, it is attributed to their malignant secret plans.
I don't know if blame should be completely lifted from establishment. Alternative explanation to theory of conspiracy at the top (or in the deep) of the state is that it is either riddled with incompetence or with impotence, and that is probably even worse message.
So, my pet meta- conspiracy theory is that most conspiracy theories are launched from within establishment to save face (LOL).
Anyone heard the story about a boy who cried wolf?
yeah, what about PizzaGate ? So fake news are only wrong when the libs are doing it, is this what's you're saying ?
Typical discusting trumpist filth.
But loli haet pizza. :(
She identifies her gender in the second sentence. Take your concern trolling elsewhere.
On second thought, keep it here on slashdot. That's probably for the best.
How is this different than advertising? Coke and Pepsi for example both try to convince you should buy their product over the other's. They attack from multiple fronts, pay for commercials and product placement, sponsor major sporting events, are active on multiple forms of social media, etc. All with the goal of swaying public opinion and convincing you that you should so something that you probably should not (drink stuff that generally isn't health for you).
That was always posted as unvetted by the media. Admittedly the stupid may have mis-read it, but that goes for anything. These conspiracy theory sites posing as news sites post everything as FACT. And last I checked, no one has shot up the Moscow Ritz Carlton because they thought the pee pee memos were gods honest truth.
The real information war is between centralized control of narratives and technology. When people have choice, and many choose to believe crazy things (sort of like when Luther posted his 95 theses), it leads to a lot of "social disruption" (like "the European wars of religion".
Well, that's just too bad.
If people want to fight the information war, they need to target the current Internet routing architecture that is recentralizing narrative into network effect monopolies emerge like YouTube, Twitter, etc. that have openly controlled access by content providers based on political content.
Read the first link in this post, and if you find that prescient for 1982, then consider this prescient as well:
Deploy Information Centric Networking to fight the recentralization of narrative.
This is the liberal media that thought it would be a good idea to run with a story about how President Trump is into watersports and hires Russian prostitutes to piss on beds once slept in by the Obamas, despite the fact that it was completely unverified and unverifiable.
No, this is the liberal media that thought it would be a good idea to run with a story that a British intelligence agency had leaked a document with several derogatory statements about President Trump, and that several intelligence agencies had suggested that it was trustworthy.
Those were actual, facts, you know, things that could be verified. Every single article about this that I'm aware of stated that the dossier may not be accurate, but that intelligence agencies suggested it might be true.
It turns out after a while that at least a significant portion of the document is true, so they seem to have had a good basis there.
Not really unverifiable if the FSB has video.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I remember how frustrating it was back when Microsoft was ruling the OS/Office world. Top executives of most companies were easily fooled into buying "microsoft compatibility" when what they should have asked for was "interoperability". It was fudged, enough shills played along, fake studies showing retraining costs etc etc. It really was frustrating. It nearly peaked at the time Microsoft added ASCII tags around binary blobs and called it OOXML, specifically to confuse it open office. Microsoft argued there must be competition among standards themselves. If the Fortune 500 companies alone invested 1% of the license cost they were paying to Microsoft pooled the money and funded program to define and certify interoperability standards, (like for example SAE defining socket wrench definitions and oil properties like 10w-40) they would have benefited enormously. But no such thing happened and it looked like all was lost.
Then came up a new generation of executives who grew up with computers, and were not afraid of retraining boogeyman. Other products came in, and top executives buying the cool Macbook did more to force Microsoft to be standard compliant than most of our shouting. Active Directory must be able to authenticate Apple products, iphones,and then androids. Open Office trying match bell for bell and whistle for whistle had such tough time. Google docs with one new feature, collaborative editing across network with latencies, made it compelling. Docs, even now, can only do a fraction of MsOffice or OpenOffice, but it meets the need of 90% of the people all the time, and the rest 90% of the time.That was enough to counter Microsofts attempts to skew the playing field.
This fake news etc are frustrating for us older generation to understand and fight. But the younger generation growing up with twitter and snapchat all the time, with fragmented clusters in facebook, will develop their own ways of adjusting credibility and their own ways of authenticating and calibrating the information sources. So I think, and hope, and pray, it is overblown.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The NYT is famous for its WMD in Iraq, Saddam is going to attack the US fake news. Fox is packed with fake news. Face it, ever since the the news media turned to click bait journalism (infotainment), the news from the left, right and center is likely to have many fake components, salted with a dash of truth to make it more palatable. The Russians did it (meaning everything bad that ever happens) is the latest in click-bait journalism. Time to boycott the mainstream (fake) press.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Making stuff up is neither left nor right.
That said, not every conspiracy is fake, and not every news article published by a major media station is true.
The real story here the media is no longer owned exclusively by 2-3 rich guys.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You can't win against that which you cannot define.
Kek.
Our beloved government joins the ranks of... well, most of them really, in having engaged in false flag operations. Given that the government is run by a bunch of unscrupulous fucks to whom things like responsibility and honesty are merely aspects of mythology, how do you expect this kind of bullshit not to go around?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This guy
Jeezus, within the first couple sentences of TFS: "University of Washington professor Kate Starbird"...
Not being able to spell "losing" is bad. Not being able to spell it when it's in the bloody headline you just read, that's a whole other level of stupid.
I agree that the inability to distinguish between "losing" and "loosing" is bad. But suggesting the use of Slashdot article headlines as guides to spelling, syntax, or grammar is just wrong.
that they can't suppress or "debunk" inconvenient truths fast enough? Oh dear.
I wonder if the social networks formed by these "rumorists" exhibit similar structural changes that can be seen in the brains of schizophrenia patients.
Oh, you mean kinda like a press pool or wire service? Since regular mass media is so full of bullshit and propaganda, are we making a distinction without a difference?
nobody believes anything anymore
Well, 'reality is a lie...'
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Our society rewards clicks no matter what information is behind it. Go fucking figure people starting perpetuating hype and bullshit when that kind of capitalistic model is presented.
This is the same reason you find mainstream news outlets perpetuating fake news. This is the same reason banking institutions purposely break laws and perpetuate unethical activity for monetary gain. The crime of manipulation is worth it.
STOP fucking rewarding the behavior that perpetuates this shit. Otherwise the proverbial global database of information will become worthless, tainted with lies and doubt.
yes simple formulas that twitter, facebook and the other social media sites use to bring relevant information to your feeds. What they never thought about is how this ends up becoming an echo chamber which only makes these claims stronger to those who believe them.
What can be done?
well the social media sites could kill the algorithms and give the control to the people over what they want to appear in their feeds. this will never happen as the social media sites would take a large hit to their advertising functions. The same concept applies to the main stream media who have become ad content providers over news agencies..(how many slashvertizements have we seen recently)
The government could stop doing shady shit with their intelligence services/military/paramilitary groups and be transparent and open so that people would actually believe the government, This will never happen as it goes against the consolidation of power, which is pretty much a given motive for any social group in a position of power.
we could try to educate people about how to find information on the Internet and not to fully trust anything they read on it. Not really plausible because there are a lot of people who will live in ignorant bliss of their shiny happy world.
So what can one person do about this? about the only thing that one can do; disconnect. focus on your local community and the people in that community. make a difference locally and try and help those around you live better and happier lives. The only way to fight the consolidation of power is to bring more power down to our communities by working together. I understand that this flies in the face of capitalism but people who live in more rural areas seem to understand the concept as well as those hardest hit who live in tent cities or other destitute living. Its the rest of us who think we are different from everyone else that are the real problem
Just Don't Look
Really. Seriously. I have spent the last couple of years really cutting back on my news. I haven't watched the nightly news for 4 years. I only catch a little bit of TV news in the breakroom at work because its on. I check the BBC website on occasion. That's really about it. I ditched Instagram, I don't do Facebook.
You'd be surprised how much most of it really doesn't matter.
To paraphrase a great quote:
If you don't watch the news, you're uninformed. If you do watch the news, you're misinformed.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Misinfotainment is everywhere. We need better critical thinking and demand for honesty.
Must have.
And you've proved me wrong about what group(s) the semiliterates were drawn from....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This guy is 1) A professor, and 2) in Boston - ergo, he's probably extremely liberal (how'd I know???)
3) a woman
University of Washington professor Kate Starbird
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Hey dickhead,
More elements of the Steele dossier are being verified by the week. If you're a troll, fuck you. If you're just ignorant, fuck you too.
captcha: idiotic
Signed,
Anonymous Brain
If the neighborhood next door has a long-term infestation of head lice that just won't subside, do you do something to help them out of it, or just sit on your porch saying "look at all those dirty people."?
They're religiously objecting to washing their hair. I've tried explaining to them over and over again that the reason we don't have head lice is because we wash our hair on a daily basis. I've also tried pointing out to them that their holy book says that they shouldn't eat bacon either, but that they have no problem eating bacon.
I just can't get through to them. They think they'll go to hell if their wash their hair. This one guy even started screaming and gesticulating at me the other day while I was buying shampoo, going off about how I'm some ivory tower liberal elitist devil worshipper. He was adamant that his god infested him with lice because of how angry I make his god every time I buy shampoo.
Do you have any suggestions for how to get through to these people and help them see that washing one's hair is just as acceptable as eating bacon? I even tried quoting from the second half of their holy book about their prophet Eli and the parable of the good barber! I'm at my wits' end!
All I can do is sit on my porch, crack open a b33r, and laugh at them. Otherwise I would weep.
At least they're not as bad as those heathens that use Emacs!
There is a bigly huge difference between reporting something incorrectly, and deliberately misleading. You need to google "false equivalence" and get back to us afterwards.
load "$",8,1
So why can't this concept apply to academia as much as it applies to AOL chat groups?
Just look at the so-called social "sciences". Your idea that "people when encountering like-minded people seem to see the fringe behaviour as socially acceptable" would very much apply there, too. Some of the ideas coming out of academia, especially the social "sciences", are well beyond the fringe.
It may even be worse within academia. Academic systems tend to have a system of self-declared "authority" built in. It's assumed that because somebody has a degree that they must know what they're talking about, and that they couldn't possibly be wrong. The "peer review" system only serves to solidify the promulgation of the subset of ideas deemed "correct" by the established and self-declared academic "authorities", which of course don't necessarily have any actual ties to reality and truth.
In many ways I'd trust the discussion at an AOL-style chat group more than that of academics. Those in a chat room likely aren't driven to promote their ideas for financial reasons, unlike academics who often need to study the "right" topics in order to obtain funding or who need to say the "right" things in order to keep their funding. Likewise, there typically isn't this myth of "authority" and "credentials" hanging over everyone, causing some people to be deemed "correct" all of the time, instead of having to actually prove what they're claiming.
(Before anyone asks, yes, I do have extensive experience within academia, and I do have degrees. I also used AOL way back, too.)
The Russians did it (meaning everything bad that ever happens) is the latest in click-bait journalism. Time to boycott the mainstream (fake) press.
20+ years ago, a number of tabloids had pictures on their front pages of Bill Clinton shaking hands with an alien, Hillary Clinton shaking hands with an alien . . . . .etc.
Nothing has changed.
We don't do hard work anymore - so it's not a surprise that the number of critical thinkers is falling rapidly.
An undergraduate history degree did wonders for my ability to spot BS, but it's always hard work. The best historical evidence is the stuff that is circumstantial to the main thrust of the story being told - because it's least likely to be deliberately manipulated. John Wesley's letters to the editor of a Bristol newspaper about brewing beer torpedo 19th century Methodism adoption of teetotalism, for example. The next best is when a chronicler is recording something he's upset to admit to happening: Emperor Julian the Apostate's complaints about the welfare efforts of the church that show up paganism's failure in the area are a great example of this.
Unfortunately it's rare to see examples of these in modern journalism - though it pops up occasionally.
I believe that the "nobody believes anything" is somewhat here today. To determine what is true, we rely on family and friends to help us. There is no longer any authority that we trust to tell us the truth. This puts us into bubbles where we only believe news that confirms our bias. We are suspicious of any news source that deviates from what we believe to be true. The internet makes it easy to confirm our bias and stay in our bubble. We need to listen to the alternate viewpoints even if we disagree. This will give us a broad background to help us think critically and help us break out of our bubbles.
nt
with ms Trumpy jr taking her 1st computer class with a 5 yrs old.. why should we be expecting to win??? it's a no brainer!
HyperNormalisation
Sadly I suspect the next generation will end up disengaged and unbelieving about anything; the present level of voting in the younger generation seems to support my pessimism.
This all seems to follow the same simple formula. 1) Create crazy sensationalist click bait headline (and article) 2) Funnel to ad-supported web site 3) Profit! If there wasn't serious money to be made doing this technique, then I am guessing the number of conspiracy theorist crackpots spreading garbage would be a lot lower. Wasn't there a story just a few months ago about Macedonian teens are making thousands of dollars creating outrageous news sites filled with political BS?
Just who is losing this alleged war? Everybody and his dog these days seems to be serving up some manner of self-serving propaganda. And if the 'we' she's talking about is all of society, then of course she's correct, because any entity that goes to war with itself loses. But this is not news; I'm pretty sure 'broken telephone' was a thing millennia before telephones even existed, and I'm virtually certain that much of the 'breakage' was an intentional part of advancing a variety of agendas.
The same news seeming to come from multiple independent sources is not a recent phenomenon. Even the Internet represents only a difference of degree, and not of kind, in that both information and disinformation travel faster and more broadly. The real difference between now and centuries ago, is the success of a public education regime founded specifically to create followers rather than leaders. As a result, most of society is both stupid, and addicted to novelty and spectacle. A lack of critical faculties and a need for ongoing distraction does NOT produce any effective immune response to the 'virus' of fake news.
I know I may sound like one of those Infowars conspiracy nuts; but if you read some John Taylor Gatto, and look at a few of the sources he quotes, you may realize that I'm really not foaming at the mouth and muttering about the sky falling. Alternatively, read a short story called Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and ask yourself if there isn't a sharp, hard grain of truth in his satire.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
At least read the first sentence or two in the summary. This 'guy' is named Kate.
Well, yeah, there's that...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
A thousand years ago, entertainment was more truth than fiction. Hear the adventure tell his story of what he saw, where he went. Told "well", sure, but still "based on a true story". Fiction was for children's bed-time, and even they were "how the beaver got its tale" legends.
Today, most entertainment is fiction -- sit coms, action movies, etc. We even have the greatest oxymoron of all: "reality" shows -- where the fiction is "told" live through artificial scenarios and fabricated editing.
So, in a modern world where we look for creative writing in stories of complete fiction, it's no wonder that we prefer our "news" to be equally "creative". "yet-another-bombing" isn't interesting, I've heard that story countless times before. A government conspiracy bombing, still unproven, now that's a more creative story, and much more interesting.
You might say that the fake news isn't valuable, and that I shouldn't care about it, but honestly, I don't care about the real news either. I'm not going to do anything when there's a bombing 1'000 miles away. I'm not going to do anything when there's a bombing 100 miles away. Quite frankly, if there's a bombing down the street, I'll simply drive around the block to get to work. I'm not an emergency responder, so until the bomb is on my street, there really isn't any difference between real-news and fake-news in terms of my actions.
So if the news isn't going to affect me anyway, I might as well read the interesting version, because it's a better read.
is entirely too difficult to implement.
And that would be rating sources and reporters with a measure of how objectively truthful they are. Because just agreeing on objective reality is difficult enough in today's culture. But imagine a rating, on every byline and broadcast. You'd KNOW whether the reporter or writer generally reports the facts on the ground, what their typical slant is, and how much is opinion.
Unfortunately, most will ignore it, and go with their tribal reporters. . .
Get all your news from only liberal outlets and you'll be fine.
I think the "we" that the author is referring to is people who make decisions based on reality. That doesn't necessarily exclude conservatives. That only means you have some intelligence and maybe even a little common sense.
The forces of disinformation are neither liberal nor conservative. They are anarchists. No one with any intelligence and anything to lose wants anarchy.
> No, this is the liberal media that thought it would be a good idea to run with a story that a British intelligence agency had leaked a document with several derogatory statements about President Trump, and that several intelligence agencies had suggested that it was trustworthy.
Except that's not what happened. A private investigator, funded by Trump opponents across party lines, made the allegations, and the PI is considered to be reliable. Most major outlets didn't publish the whole report, only saying there are allegations that are salacious in nature. It was BuzzFeed that said "here it all is, verbatim, you figure it out yourselves".
The problem I see here is whether or not the media should report on suspicions. Suspicions are theories, not facts. Suspicions can be supported by other facts mind you, and sometimes those facts can compel someone or some entity to further investigate those suspicions, and some suspicions are outlandish and esoteric and until something more concrete comes around to support it, then we can ignore it.
Trump is certainly a bad person, and he represents the worst of America. But if we keep jumping on every opportunity possible to say he's bad, then the anti-Trump people are just crying wolf. There is already plenty of cannon fodder to use against Trump and the GOP, such as their incredibly amateurish attempt at reforming healthcare. I mean, how can you take any politician seriously when they openly advocate to let their own constituents die to save money?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
For most people, "guy" has evolved to be gender neutral.
"Hey guys!" is acceptable to say to a group of mixed gendered individuals.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Because rampant pedophilia among those in power is a completely crazy idea, right? Oh wait, it seems to happen more often, than you'd care to admit
Everyone knew that Iraq was not about to attack the US. It was fake, and even Colin Powell admits his testimony at the UN was bunk. Real journalists check their facts, they don't just report what they are told by officials. The NYT was intentionally misleading the public. That is the definition of fake news.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Yeah but if you report on what Colin Powell says thats not fake news, what was bullshit was him saying it, not papers reporting what he said. The misinformation around the iraq war came straight from the white house and from our own intelligence agencies. Pizza gate came from 4chan.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Basically you have to liberalize their children, and support their more liberal clerics only to the extent that
it gives them an edge up over the recalcitrant ones.
At least they're not as bad as those heathens that use Emacs!
Guilty as charged. I'm even considering making a T-shirt that says "essential vi/chapter one/:q/the end"
Someone had to do it.
Lol more fake news outta u
Doesn't that directly lead to the conclusion that power should be decentralized? If people are fallible, then fallible people should not be allowed to exert authority over others' choices -- except when there's an absolutely necessary, critical need, along with substantial procedural safeguards.
In short: government should be humble and hands-off in ordinary situations. Because people make mistakes, and they shouldn't be empowered to force those mistakes on others.
This is no surprise. The mainstream media sells its editorial control to their largest advertisers, Be Pharma, Big Death (General Dynamics etc) Much of their so called news and information is advertisements for a political agenda or a social agenda nobody in their right mind wants. You would have to be an idiot not to see the propaganda and lies.
It really doesn't matter the source of the false information, it is that it is false. The NYT knew that Iraq was not preparing to attack the US, but it was good for access journalism, and good for their profits. Indeed, when the source of the fake news if from "the paper of record" the malfeasance is even more severe. Journalism is not just writing down what the WH tells you to. Iraq's weapons programs had been systematically dismantled with UN oversight over the previous decade, and the NYT knew that. It was fake news.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
"There is a bigly huge difference between reporting something incorrectly, and deliberately misleading"
Are you sure? "Reporting something incorrectly" can provide some plausible deniability, but not enough to rule out the fact that the networks are just massive propaganda sources. In fact, given most networks established shenanigans in the primaries I would say the onus is on you and the news agencies to establish and maintain credibility.
Unfortunately, the "critical thinking" buzzword it itself fuzzy and does not have a fixed meaning.
To many people, disbelieving everything they are told IS critical thinking.
What people really need is logical thinking; i.e., teach logic.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The political statement is made by selectively focusing only the so-called "alt" media sites. Author doesn't level their accusations on the MSM, which was guilty of these acts long before any alt-media ever showed up, is still doing it now, and is being allowed to get away with it because nobody with any clout will call them out on the matter (probably because they're afraid of having their careers ruined by said powers).
It's a typical tactic of the Left. Accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of. Accuse Trump of Russia collusion when there is no evidence while ignoring the Clinton uranium deal. Claim that trump will start war with his big mouth, and instead we see (D) McCain's warmongering big mouth on the verge of starting war with North Korea. Accuse the Right of being violent, low-intelligence thugs, yet it's the Left always starting riots and committing violence at otherwise peaceful gatherings.
Decentralized government may have it merits, but I am more concerned about Corporations exerting unchecked authority and control over others' choices.
Except any relationship you have to a corporation is 100% voluntary. So corporations have no "authority" over your choices.
For bonus points, map the connections from the originators back to the NRA & firearms manufacturers.
MSM is horrible, and possibly worse than what we used to make fun of in the USSR called Pravda. Let me give a couple examples.
Subject 1: "No proof that A"
Subject 2: "Suspicion that B"
There is no logical difference between those two statements, both indicate that A and B both lack enough facts to result in a conclusion. Yet MSM constantly uses this format to denounce A and promote B to suite their agenda (or visa-versa). This type of rhetoric is extremely powerful and hard for most to understand.
They similarly cherry pick content to distort messages, and completely omit facts and stories that would harm their agenda. Monopolization of media means that this is done at massive scale with collusion among nearly all of MSM.
Since people can see through the clouds, at least on occasions where it's obvious, we have come to a point of information deficit in MSM. There is little to no unbiased news. If you are truly unbiased your only option is to go find original sources, which is a daunting and time consuming task. I find it less time consuming to find sources than sift through hours of opinions, but that is something I had to force myself to do (which makes it easier).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Its not a crazy idea that there is paedophilia and that it might include some people in power . What is crazy is that its a global conspiracy led by the Vatican and driven by Satanic Worship. If you read the sites referenced in the article I can guarantee that is where they will lead you (although you probably knew that).
Wag The Dog was released in 1997. The growth in internet usage has just made it a lot easier.
This guy is 1) A professor, and 2) in Boston - ergo, he's probably extremely liberal (how'd I know???)
Not everyone is losing the information war. Just your side.
It's sad that it has come so far that being educated and informed automatically labels you a liberal. I think it really reflects the low point that conservatism in the US has reached, peaking with Donald Trump being elected as president.
Because by saying that you of course suggest the other side of the coin, being that conservatism in the US has shifted towards ignorance, populism and a science-denying base of people with simple solutions to complex problems.
Such as building walls.
The Age of Enlightenment is what separated the West from other parts of the planet, such as the Middle East, Africa and Asia. This is what enabled our amazing progress in the last few centuries. Critical thinking, intellectualism, freedom of thought and religion, all of these great and amazing things. It seems some parts of the US want to turn back the wheels of time and return to the age of monarchs, priests and superstition.
Facts don't matter any more and people celebrate it. Men can become women and women can become men. The unborn aren't people.
I usually refrain from responding to stooopid, but here goes. First off, this guy is a she. Didn't even have to RTFA for that. Actually she's the former WNBA star from the Seattle Storm, don't-cha know. And the political baiting - more stooopid. [Spelling intentional.]
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Properly functioning bullshit detectors are a matter of training in an environment conducive to developing one. If you do not have an environment where you can check facts, you cannot develop an instinct for who's shoveling turd and you cannot develop research skills. If you are surrounded by people in a similar situation, you're prone to develop your own dissembling skills as a survival mechanism, rather than an appreciation of honesty. You have to have something to get your footing on. In other words it is down to proper education, environment, and mentoring, not laziness.
If the neighborhood next door has a long-term infestation of head lice that just won't subside, do you do something to help them out of it, or just sit on your porch saying "look at all those dirty people."?
The answer should be the former, if not for moral reasons, then for the fact that the consequences may occasionally spill out onto you.
FTFY. The "latter" would be sitting on your porch. The "former" is doing something to help.
> Pizza gate came from 4chan.
You're giving them too much credit. As if they could have figure-out all of Podesta's bizarre references and found the $65,000+ check for pizza. Yes, it's obvious something dishonest is going on, but I don't think those kids are smart enough to have found it.
20+ years ago, a number of tabloids had pictures on their front pages of Bill Clinton shaking hands with an alien, Hillary Clinton shaking hands with an alien . . . . .etc.
Nothing has changed.
That's one of the official functions of the presidents, to shake hands with all kind of aliens, even if they don't like them.
Oh, wait, you were talking about ET aliens, right?
I'll remember that when I pay my mandatory BBC licence fee.
Only if you consider the "Unabomber option" - living in a shack in the woods and not participating in the economy - a viable option. Otherwise corporations will have PLENTY of authority over your choices.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You can notice something very odd in all of the political related threads here recently. The most suspicious is this one yesterday https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/03/29/2046208/two-activists-who-secretly-recorded-planned-parenthood-face-15-felony-charges.
Notice how many "nerds" are now religious conservatives and nationalists on here. I do not buy it. It hasn't been like this in years until the past year or so. Something is not right. They're either going out of their way to support their team or this site is on the radar enough of those who are engaging in the online propaganda war via comments sections, discussion sites, and social media.
If you're wondering why the hell they'd bother with /., well I do think they know "nerds" are a perfect target as they spend are likely to spend more time online, often on largely anonymous discussion sites, and their view of the world and those around them can be shaped more by what they read and the comments. Some may also feel socially rejected and those trying to pull them to the far right offer them some people to blame for that, like women, "SJWs", the left, etc. They may see themselves as weaker in the real world and more likely to feel afraid of others not like them, so they're pushed towards this idea of "alpha" males and these alpha males just happen to be nationalist right politically because being liberal/left is for women and "betas". This can be pushed even to even more extremes, presenting males of non-white ethnic groups as inherently alpha who will take over the white race because of all the supposed beta white males. There are also a lot more males from similar demographics than those not on certain websites (like this one), subreddits, videogames, etc. so there are fewer voices to call out people making shit up to fuck with their targets.
They actually only need a few people and access to a bunch of IPs to create the impression there are a lot more with certain viewpoints. They only need to bother with threads related to politics, hence you'll rarely see them on the non-political ones, which often get far view comments. If they're doing this full time, rather than how most of us come here during downtime at work or before or after work, they can easily manage commenting here and a few other sites simultaneously.
If this isn't on the radar of those engaging in the online propaganda onslaught, they perhaps those commenting as if they are have been manipulated effectively on other nerd related sites that are far more likely being targeted, particularly 4chan and Reddit.
After googles b2012 Penguin update it became tough to get traffic from them, people resorted to misinformation after that. The people you get from this type of traffic will click anything.... perfect for ppc.
[($)]
Otherwise corporations will have PLENTY of authority over your choices.
False. You can say "no" to any offer. The fact that you say "yes" to some of the nicer offers is not "authority". Please consider being truthful, since that's the actual original topic being discussed.
the scientific way of saying "you think".
Refuse to pay. If the corporate police come to take you to the corporate holding facility, you have a corporate problem. If the government police come to take you to the government holding facility, you have a government problem.
This is the logical conclusion of a society where people are indoctrinated from birth that the right way of thinking is to believe in just one point-of-view, instead of many. People become slaves to a sequence of simple-minded exclusive conclusions, instead of embracing a reasonable set of possibilities, with any person who prefers to hold more than one opinion being called whatever is the flavor insult of the current times. This idea of monolithic thought is so toxic it makes people treat their opinions as if they were a part of their very self, inflating their importance and turning people into self-righteous smuglords. The very act of discussing with them becomes an act of lowering yourself to their way of thinking and any possible common ground is impossible to be found.
I'd be surprised if "The Real Dr John" didn't read Breitbart or similar websites. The right only pushes this "they're all equally liars!!!" nonsense when they're called on their shit after attempting to discredit non-right wing news sources.
Journalism is not just writing down what the WH tells you to.
Actually, part of journalism is, in fact, writing down what the subject tells you. The White House has their "press release" and the journalists report what was in the release. It wasn't fake news, it was real news, it just so happened to be false. Reporters given false information from seemingly trustworthy sources, with no readily available means to validate the information, aren't spreading fake news.
They reported the facts, "(Some person) from the White House said in a release that..." That is a fact, not fake news. What the White House person said to them may be fake news, but not the reporter reporting it.
Capcha: deceives
such as "false flag" and "crisis actor," web slang meaning a shooting is not what the government or the traditional media is reporting it to be.
Duh. You could get a better description on Wikipedia. "False flag" is when someone, it could be government agents, does an offensive act while pretending to be someone else to pin the blame on them. Typically to use it as a casus belli afterwards. It happened when Hitler invaded Poland (Gleiwitz incident).
That he heard it was actually a Romanian strike force assembled at Disney that did it ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I mean, how can you take any politician seriously when they openly advocate to let their own constituents die to save money?
What, you mean this guy that listens to (supposedly) regular joes? You wouldn't know that watching CNN because they mysteriously lost their connection the moment people started discussing their personal problems that came about because of the ACA.
Soon after Nancy Pelosi tweeted asking for people to share their Obamacare stories and the replies were mostly negative. Just because it improved things for some people doesn't mean it's a good thing if it's at the cost of the majority.
President Trump's claims of the imminent collapse of Obamacare might not be so far fetched when leaked documents claim that the Obama administration seized the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, with the alleged intention of using it to fund Obamacare at the cost of fewer Americans becoming home owners.
1. Windows is easy.
2. Post.
3. Go to 1.
You are abusing the notion of "fake news".
The NYT made abundant true information about Iraq available. I never thought for tiniest moment Iraq would ever try to attack the US based on news sources such as the NYT.
The question is whether the paper of record should bury or ignore public statements from the sitting president or the secretary of state about a topic that people seem to care about, just because the editors believe that those public statements are deliberately misleading. That is a tough one. Pretending it is easy is not a solution.
President Trump's claims of the imminent collapse of Obamacare might not be so far fetched when leaked documents claim that the Obama administration seized the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, with the alleged intention of using it to fund Obamacare at the cost of fewer Americans becoming home owners.
Wasn't it less then ten years ago that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were the ones responsible for fewer americans being home owners? Something something housing crisis?
If the professor is relying on comments on Social Media, then he is being mislead. Twitter has close to half a million fake accounts
I would not be surprised to learn that Facebook and the other S.M. sites suffer from the same thing.
Social Media is an advertising venue. It invites fake users and fake news.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I am being truthful. Sometimes the choice is between "yes" to an offer and "the Unabomber option." Whether you call it "authority" or not, that's the "choice" you have.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Please explain your issues with the supposed "Uranium Deal"
I have yet to see anyone that raises the "Uranium Deal" understand that the Uranium in question is in the ground, in a mine, in Canada. Even with Russian ownership of said mine any processed ore will need additional approvals before the ore can be shipped out of Canada. Canadian and US approvals.
The US State Department, under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, was tasked to review whether the proposed purchase of a CANADIAN mine that produces raw uranium violated any laws or rules against foreign ownership. The Canadian State Department equivalent had already approved the deal, were they bought off too?
Again, to ship any processed Uranium ore from the mine additional approvals would be needed from both the Canadian and US Governments. FYI Russia has plenty of Uranium mines capable of producing enough Uranium to satisfy their requirements.
Yeah, I know explaining anything to an Anonymous Coward Troll is a waste of time.
True, a relationship with any specific corporation is usually voluntary BUT unless I can do without electricity, food, water, etc I must deal with some corporations.
The fact that I have to breathe the air and drink the water that said corporations believes they have a license to pollute I am dealing with said corporation.
There's no single offer like that. Saying yes to some offers isn't saying yes to all offers. Saying no to any offer isn't saying no to all offers.
"Authority" has a specific meaning. If you want to make up new meanings for words, that's not being truthful.
"part of journalism is, in fact, writing down what the subject tells you"
But just one part, otherwise you're a stenographer.
That sounds nice, in the abstract. But those ideas do not prove useful for even deciding whether the city should re-pave a crumbling road, or ever build a new road at all.
The problem is it is misleading to assume that every gov't mistake is costly in a manner that is important. Like any large organization, the real question is whether the number of successes is sufficient to make supporting that organization a good deal when the mistakes are weighed in the full context.
For example: It the city builds 100 miles of road, it is probably still a good deal if 2 miles of that road were put in a foolish place, assuming that the other 98 miles were placed wisely.
I'd be surprised if "The Real Dr John" didn't read Breitbart or similar websites. The right only pushes this "they're all equally liars!!!" nonsense when they're called on their shit after attempting to discredit non-right wing news sources.
Exactly!
We're not going to get rid of this fake right-wing whacko crap until the government steps in. Many will scoff and criticize and call me names but we need an equivalent to the Ministry of Truth.
Not until we can prosecute those who create/distribute fake news will society be safe from right-wing nutjobs. We need a government agency to vet news and facts in order to set standards. If you want to post some screed in print or on the 'net, fine. Just have it cleared by the authorities first. Otherwise go to jail.
There is no 1st amendment right to spread untruths. Any news or media that spreads fake news like PP selling baby parts or Hillary Clinton involved in quid pro quo concerning the Russians obtaining permission to acquire Uranium One or the fake Clinton/SoS email scandal should be prosecuted and jailed.
It's the only way we'll be truly free.
Not sure what your point is. Governments act by force, corporations act by making you a nice offer that you agree to because it's better than declining it.
It is very easy for journalists to contradict those in power if they choose to. They claim that the Trump administration is misleading people virtually daily. I am not misusing the term fake news, most of the mainstream media are. To them fake news is anything that contradicts their current Washington-speak. Russia hacked the election is the current fake news from the mainstream media. No evidence is provided. Probably because they got caught faking things like the forged documents on yellow cake from Nigeria, and the mobile bio weapons labs that were in fact weather balloon stations. So now the media are reluctant to put out fake evidence that might come back later and undermine their credibility further. Now allegations fly with no evidence given. If that isn't fake news, then I just don't know what could possibly be.
Giant corporations own all of the mainstream media, and they have many reasons to distort the news and engage in "perception management".
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
No, but quite frequently you deal with "different" but effectively the same corporations. They reduce to suboptimal consumer outcomes because of prisoner-dilemma type situations. Government protections are a way around this.
Actually, part of journalism is, in fact, writing down what the subject tells you. The White House has their "press release" and the journalists report what was in the release. It wasn't fake news, it was real news, it just so happened to be false. Reporters given false information from seemingly trustworthy sources, with no readily available means to validate the information, aren't spreading fake news.
Yes they are, dumbass.
Journalism 101: DO NOT REPORT ANYTHING YOU CANNOT VERIFY WITH AT LEAST 2 SEPARATE SOURCES.
If you're reporting on what someone said, and they said something factual (and not an opinion), and you know those facts are false or unsupported, you must also report that those facts are false or unsupported. It doesn't matter who is saying it.
Seriously. Stop watching TV. Stop reading biased news (paper and on the internet) Stop gobbling up packaged entertainment news. Start watching the actual leader's speech, and form your own conclusions instead of condensed media spin. When the eyeballs dry up on the talking heads, things will change. We've been conditioned over the span of nearly 70 years to accept 8 hours of job creating value for others, followed by 3-5 hours of family screen consumption/repeat. We've allowed this to color our cultural world view so deeply that we now bicker between each other nothings like red vs blue, boys vs girls, and white vs black, every single time something important happens (or is about to happen). Its our news, our shows, our music, its all over our public gathering places, its in our schools, and our jobs.. its in our vehicles and in our communications. I can't barley pump gas without some clown on a screen trying to get me fired up over the latest non-issue, or trying to enrage/outrage me against some cause that aint even mine.
It's evident just reading through this discussion, and nearly every discussion on /. and everywhere else online since the last American election. The spin machine was cranked up to 11 for that shit-show, and it never got turned back down. Fake news is just the next thing to keep you and me bickering with each other instead of paying attention to things like the rise of our inevitable medical costs, the evaporation of our personal freedoms, and the buying and selling of our elected leaders by the very ones peddling the broken media and broken healthcare in the first place.
There is now way fake news is an accident. Its so god-damned effective its fucking genius.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Doesn't that directly lead to the conclusion that power should be decentralized?
No it doesn't. It only seems to be a "direct" conclusion to you because of where you personally stand on the Hobbes vs Rousseau debate
If people are fallible, then fallible people should not be allowed to exert authority over others' choices
That does not follow. Such an argument could just as easily be used in the opposite direction: the masses are fallible and too dumb to be trusted with decentralized power.
As above, which direction of the argument you find more convincing is merely a personal preference on Hobbes vs Rousseau scale.
You underestimate people who use 4Chan. They recently located a terrorist training camp based off of a single, shitty photo. Russia then blew it the fuck up. They also recently identified the location of an individual based only on a livestream of a flagpole. 4Chan is a very diverse place that many people of many backgrounds and skillsets frequent.
There's no single offer like that.
Sure there is, it's quite common to only have one choice for utilities and telecoms. Even when there's more than one, often the offers aren't meaningfully different.
"Authority" does have a specific meaning and I'd argue that it applies when you have a choice to take whatever phone package your local telecom monopoly/duopoly offers so that you can participate in the economy, or go Unabomber.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I never thought for a moment Saddam had WMDs* because news articles went out of their way to quote the likes of Hans Blix who spelled out how impossible it was. And the whole Anthrax scare, which honestly didn't bother me**.
Easy. You just tell people what to think. Don't even bother providing evidence. Unless it's something people disagree with, in which case they'll refute you even if you provide evidence. Works on the right (and left***).
Seriously, though, there's nothing wrong with calling out lies and presenting evidence. It's just clear that Bush and his Admin lied so much, it became necessarily to blatantly spell out: "Yes, he's lying." Mostly this was due to things like The Daily Show which went out of their way to present just how much politicians were lying. It makes me wish that The Daily Show had started as early as the Reagan years and some equally cynical, good right leaning show existed during Obama's years. Instead, we just got conspiracy theories and useless crap.
* Short of the semi-expired or otherwise misplaced and unknown canisters found after extensive searches. Meaningfully, it'd be equivalent to calling someone a major pot dealer, searching their mansion, and then finding one partly used joint...after having, through government approval, years earlier used the place as a joint rolling operation. Nothing like actual production. Nothing like actual stockpiling.
** As much as I care for the sanctity of human life, if we lost a few politicians because of some anthrax, we could just elect some more. The real risk to a democracy from such an action was basically nothing, so any attempt to conflate it with a major attack--like how the US sends in war planes and drops bombs--is insane.
*** Generally speaking, most of the media does have a left-leaning bias that takes the form of presuming certain progressive ideas are correct and often presenting flimsy or no evidence to support the notion. As much as I'm very liberal/left-leaning on many things, it's pretty obvious at times how absurd it is when they refuse to challenge certain ideas but will focus on challenging others. Clearly, it's based on opinion more than fact and not always something I or others agree with****.
**** Off-topic rant: The new big thing is embracing fat models. Not healthy models. Or shaming an industry that obsesses over young, pencil thing models of which there aren't remotely enough of a supply that otherwise healthy models have to go on starvation diets to conform. But fat models who complain that to even be a healthy weight is a big struggle for them and then happily embrace modeling while being fat. Because if being and pushing for pencil thin models is a bad role model, certainly being an obese (which is epidemic in the US) model wouldn't be a bad role model. Screw moderation, right? Or accepting that if it's too much of a struggle to be a healthy-weight model, get another job? *sigh*
Catholic pedophilia was literally a global conspiracy led by the Vatican. We don't know how the top echelons of power interact with each other, but they seem plenty friendly. John Podesta has met with more than one Pope, and has been photographed having participated in a ritual that the person running it admitted was satanic and was for real, not some sort of art installation (ie it was done in private). People who take part in such rituals have no moral standing to claim that they are somehow above things like child rape or sex slavery.
If you don't want to connect the dots, that's fine, but you could at least admit that the pattern other people are drawing seems to fit the evidence, even if you think it is an incorrect conclusion because $argument.
That's sort of like how electricity and running water are optional. Try raising kids without those, and see how long it takes child services to intervene. Authority is irrelevant, when the corporations have so much effective power over your options.
Then check out what "luser" means
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/luser?s=t
"a user of a computer system, as considered by a systems administator or other member of a technical support team "
the thing is when the white house makes a press release that itself is news
They did make a press release, there are many many many sources backing that up and those same sources will confirm exactly what the press release said
Thats news because the whilte house is important. If you make a press release that might not qualify, it depends on who you are and what the release is about.
Its also news if you independently verify the contents of the press release, or if you can dispute them. THAT is something that requires verification.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I've yet to find the opt-out clause for big corporations buying laws through lobbying. Corporations can screw you over even if you've never heard of them or interacted with them.
"part of journalism is, in fact, writing down what the subject tells you"
But just one part, otherwise you're a stenographer.
Perhaps, but I think there's a difference between regular "tell what someone said" journalism and investigative, fact-checking journalism.
The collapse of the newspaper industry has almost eliminated the latter, news departments have very little investigative capabilities, and they're owned by entities that are not interested in that type of journalism anymore.
Prof. Kate is a not a guy. Bunch of fucking Slashdot retards.
Because corporations never leverage/partner with the government to enforce their actions. Please go away troll.
Rumors and urban legends circulated long before the Internet. The Internet just sped up the process of spreading them.
The question is, where did /pol/ get it?
It's entirely conceivable - indeed likcely - that some random /b/tard or /pol/tard came up with it because, well, it *is* kinda funny.
It's also conceivable that it propagated so well because, well, as mentioned, it *is* kinda funny.
But it's also conceivable that it had a little help. Suppose you're some random Vlad in the Kremlin's troll factory looking for disinformation to spread. You pick up on this. You see it's got a little organic traction. You do some A/B testing with a few dozen alts, shitpost some image macros, like you do every day, but this one takes off.
Bang. Meme achieves virality. Replicates itself in the minds of its hosts. You take your hands off the controls and let it go. (And you come in for your next shfit to bump a few threads to nudge the most successful ideas of the night... lather, rinse, repeat.)
There are two types of disinformation. There's the type we're all accustomed to (for example, "research" supporting the hypothesis that smoking tobacco was safe) where the disinforming side clearly has something to gain from your acceptance of their argument.
But this is a different type - a type where it doesn't matter what the disinformation is. If you can get 10% of the population believing in Pizzagate, you've already won because you've basically shut them off from 90% of the world's universe of ideas. Any outlet that suggests that Pizzagate was bullshit gets all of its reporting rejected into the "MSM LIES!" bucket.
Do that four or five times -- there's a lot of overlap between conspiracy theorists, but maybe there's 1% of the population that disbelieves Pizzagate but believes the Spirit Cooking story, and a different 1% that believes neither of those but was totally sold on the Ted Cruz = Lee Harvey Oswald conspiracy -- and it's the union of all those sets, not their intersection, that enables you to fundamentally alter the composition of the likely-voter portion of the electorate.
I believe most people would agree with you, but you have to have enough mass seeing the dishonesty demanding change. Right now you have a good amount of people pointing out the dishonesty, but you have the extreme right taking advantage of the information starvation and putting up fake news. You also have people on the far left promoting fake news of the same variety trying to discredit people showing the deficit.
It's not an easy problem to tackle, but we should start by agreeing that censorship is absolutely not the solution.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Sure nice offer, we are the corporation that provides water and sewer to your subdivision, pay us the money or you don't get water and sewer and oh by the way we own all the water rights around here so you can't have your own well.
You can buy your electricity from us or nobody, and we will work with the local government to make it impossible for you to have your own solar or wind installation to provide your own power.
That is what I am getting at.
To be fair, Pizza gate wasn't fake news, it was an _inquiry_ into unexplained emails released by Wikileaks. No one wanted it to be true, they just wanted it investigated because no one was. That's not the same as actively reporting unfounded false-hoods about a presidential candidate because he disagrees with your politics.
Yeah I guess when you blatantly lie to and exploit the public they eventually catch on and stop trusting you, even if you happen to tell the truth.
The spoiled upper classes are finally getting the backlash they deserve for their mindless exploitation, and of course, it's anyone's fault but theirs. Their days are numbered. This hyperpartisan bubble is about to burst.
Too bad all that postmodernist delusion didn't ACTUALLY suspend natural law, huh?
Yeah, they just beat up Trump supporters in the streets and constantly screech about how Trump is a Russian plant while actively agitating for a violent revolution.
Reading and comprehension....
What the person you responded to wrote was "It's kind of a shame that you would really think that. Confirmation bias and gullibility are not monopolized by one side of a political divide. Anyone who thinks they are always correct and clear-eyed, is simply wrong."
The "guy" part was in the post responded to, one level up and your dead on point would have been correctly leveled.
emt 377 emt 4
Everyone is missing the big picture here. This person's last name is really Starbird? That's AWESOME!
You've obviously never been to Boston
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
This 'guy' is named Kate.
Are you assuming xir's gender, shitlord?!?!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The term conspiracy theory is a ham fisted attempt to stifle any discussion about validity of claims, by placing the derisive commentor in a state of operating from a place of knowledge. Clean your shoes... they're filthy.
Will anyone doubt that most people are stupid? Even if most people are excluding themselves when making that sort of estimation.
I will never forget the lead up to the Iraq war. There was such a blitz of propaganda and lies that I was astonished when most Americans were fooled by it. Over the intervening years I have grown almost accustomed to both hearing lies and seeing seemingly thoughtful people believing in them. So it amazes me when I hear about this recent epidemic of fake news as I have considered this a problem for quite sometime. And even so, it seems as though the fake news narrative is stuck in the present without any sort of reflection on the past. Just from the top of my head I can think of several fake news stories surrounding episodes of history that became important. Hearst said in the lead up to the Spanish-AMerican war that if journalists "could furnish the pictures, he'll furnish the war" and this was during the McKinley administration. As it happens, the siren's call to the war ended up being "remember the maine!" after the ship that was allegedly attacked. It would only become clear that later that the Maine was sunk from an explosion from the inside which made the foundations for the Spanish American war to be: "Fake News!"
But nearly all wars are started with the culmination of lies and the press is always a necessary element of the tragedy. In WWI the wretch Woodrow Wilson would send a ship full of civilians to Britain while also full of munitions for the British War effort (the Lusitania) so as to provoke a strike against the ship which Woodrow would undoubtedly sell to the people as a bold German attack against a helpless civilian liner. Though the German government did print notices in American papers stating that they were going to attack the ship and why. And this is separate from the propaganda efforts of the time to incite the fear of the German race--"Krauts"--throughout the country and even the absurd lie that Germans was preparing to ally with Mexico and invade the United States, which was laughable considering the vast ocean between them.
WWII had its own elements of fake news. Just look at how the press was complicit in hiding the fact that FDR couldn't walk. Was that fake news? Regardless, the coverage of Pearl Harbor was by and large deceitful and praised the administration that Robert Stinnet would later show incited the Pearl Harbor attacks and prevented the leadership at the Hawaii colony from being in the chain of command. The administration did everything it could to make Pearl Harbor a spectacle and the press was mor than happy to oblige.
Lies, lies, lies is just another word for journalism. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin incident! Lies that led to American graves! And never forget the USS Liberty, which was ruthlessly attacked by our "ally" Israel in the 60s. How did the news cover that event? With bullshit and innuendo, none of the people that died that day or suffered through the attack have ever been given recognition nor has Israel been made to acknowledge their crime. What an ally! There was also Granada. Lies! Iran-Contra. Lies! Operation Keel-Haul was also a war crime forgotten because of who it was that was brutally murdered. Apparently some people deserve to die in our wonderful national narrative.
So I ask, given the long history of fake news, why is this suddenly a problem? How is it that this "professor" is not merely a well-paid sophist weaving explanations for political ideology when there are far simpler explanations like that the vast majority of people that consume news do so uncritically and inside of a historical vacuum; that the medium of "news" as it currently exists is intrinsically biased and that expertise has always been a woven from the same cloth as the fallacy 'appeal to authority'. We suffer through this fake-news simply because the truth is subjective and needs context. If you demand of truth objectivity and neutrality you have already asked the journalists to lie to you. It is at the ind
Huh? In the plural, sure, although it's still pretty colloquial. I'd use it to address a mixed-gender group of friends. In the singular it absolutely is still male.
Wrong, the source of the false information is the only thing that matters. That's what the media is for, to tell you who is saying what.
If you then take everything they report as "true", then of course you're going to end up with a mass of contradictions and a growing belief that the media is lying to you. The media isn't lying, they're telling you - truthfully, as far as they can - who is lying to you.
No, journalism is not just writing down what the White House tells you to. Journalism is writing "White House spokesman (insert name here) said this". If they do this faithfully and correctly, every single time, then you can figure out who to blame for the lies - and then the media will have done its job.
(Well, to be more precise they're telling you who is saying what to you. They will, sometimes, try to pick out the lies from facts themselves, but when they do, their fact checking will be in the form of more statements of the type "X said Y". It's up to you to take this input and decide what you believe about all these agencies. It's not the media's job to make up your mind about that, and when they try to - that's when they fail their job.)
Sorry, the flat earth conspiracy is genuinely ridiculous & deserves to be called that.
Sure nice offer, we are the corporation that provides water and sewer to your subdivision, pay us the money or you don't get water and sewer and oh by the way we own all the water rights around here so you can't have your own well.
You can buy your electricity from us or nobody, and we will work with the local government to make it impossible for you to have your own solar or wind installation to provide your own power.
That is what I am getting at.
That's a problem of business co-opting the power of government.
The solution is to not allow the central government so much power that it becomes attractive and risk-worthy for businesses (or other interests) to co-opt.
That is what the concept of "limited government" was invented to address. Nothing is perfect, but it largely and for the most part worked fairly well until people wanted government to be their wet-nurse and handed politicians, of all people, tons of unchecked power.
Now we have what we see every day out of Washington, D.C.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If I trust CNN, I'd believe we elected Hitler as President who rapes women, is a Russian spy, is ready to Nuke Russia, is a Chinese spy, is going to have his company build the wall to make money off it, allowed wall street to take over the white house, pepe is a racist frog, the alt-right took over the USA, every other news agencies other than CNN is #FakeNews, Breitbart is ran by Jewish nazi's, Milo is a white supremacist (And a gay jew who likes black men), Trumps wife was a high end call girl, Trump personally put black families on the street in NY, Trump was the downfall of Atlantic City, Trump was never rich and got all his money from his dad, Trump is an idiot and never graduated school (Warton is overrated, right?!), Trump will deport all Mexicans, Trump will never do anything for minorities and never touch a black issue (Like fund black colleges!), Ban all muslims from the US, Says Bigly not Big League, Filled stadiums of white men who are natzi's across the US, Is a secret KKK member, Grabs women by the pussy as they walk down the hallway.
Sure glad CNN is there to tell me the truth. Would hate to hear otherwise.
You obviously didn't read the article but just thought you'd make the typical comment that all InfoWarriors make, eh? #failure
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
It really doesn't matter the source of the false information, it is that it is false. The NYT knew that Iraq was not preparing to attack the US, but it was good for access journalism, and good for their profits. Indeed, when the source of the fake news if from "the paper of record" the malfeasance is even more severe. Journalism is not just writing down what the WH tells you to. Iraq's weapons programs had been systematically dismantled with UN oversight over the previous decade, and the NYT knew that. It was fake news.
There is a HUGE difference between the following statements, if you can't see it then you have no hope and are a blight on humanity.
"Iraq is storing WMDs and they are probably going to use them on us" vs.
"This morning, Colin Powell said, 'Iraq is storing WMDs and they are probably going to use them on us'"
One is fake, one is 100% real. The person to be mad at is Colin Powell.
Sure they can report on suspicions, just do it in a manner that says, "This is the suspicion" "This is who suspects it" "This is why that entity suspects it".
Boom, 100% real news. Nothing fake about it.
What part is business co-opting the power of government?
I live in a rural environment that only a single corporation has chosen to provide these services to us, if anything it is the small government ceding governmental functions to corporation. Water and Sewer is provided by a public corporation that charges what it wants because the price of entry for a competitor would be astronomical, think of the cost of building a new sewage treatment plant and laying the piping to connect to a different corporate owned sewer infrastructure.
There is no legal barrier to a competitor, just financial. Same goes for the power company no legal barriers to a competitor BUT legal barriers do exist for producing my own power and yes that is somewhat co-opting the power of government.
Rural El Paso County Colorado has some of the staunchest small government advocates in the country. Research TABOR (Tax Payer Bill or Rights), first enacted here in El Paso County.
The political Right got a serious chip on it's shoulder during the 1980's and decided that "the media" had it in for them.
This led to the establishment of Fox News, the founding of careers like Rush Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell University. And let's not forget the endless procession of televangelists like the PTL Network. These groups have made genuine Fake News for decades now.
However the internet was the biggest turning point. Suddenly anyone could broadcast their personal obsessions, claim opinion as fact and no one could tell you were a dog. We used to think that democratic principles (fringe opinions get swamped by mainstream opinion groups) would dominate. It hasn't worked out that way. Frankly, some of the really obsessed types are much more active online than ordinary people just living their lives. That amplifies the opinion of the tinfoil hatters and can eventually persuade even the soccer Moms and Dads.
Reality may have a well known liberal bias, but internet trolls have been successful at poisoning the political conversations of the nation.
Fox is the reason why these groups are becoming the norm.
The term "fake news" has really entered into the zeitgeist in a noticeable way that just wasn't there a few years ago.
I think it's a response to clickbait ads portraying themselves as news, but it's in danger of undermining the little credibility mainstream news has left. But lazy reporting, biased reporting or opinion pieces are very separate and maybe shouldn't be lumped in with the clickbait stuff. Lazy language = lazy thought and this is worth doing right.
What if we called the clickbait stuff "news-vertisements" or something similar? That'd keep that plague separate from actual news, regardless of quality.
"Your brain tells you 'Hey, I got this from three different sources,'" Starbird says. "But you don't realize it all traces back to the same place
I had none less than a philosophy professor once (philosophy of religion, natch) try to argue that multiple non-independent attestations to a claim do in fact add up to more reason to believe the claim than fewer (equally non-independent) claims do.
Say for instance there are two eye-witnesses to an event, one of whom is immensely social, and the other of whom is a shut-in who only knows a few other shut-ins like himself. In time, all of the many friends of friends of friends of friends of the more-social eye-witness are repeating his account of the event, while only a handful of people will recount the less-social eye-witness's version of events. You, coming into the scene, thus have many attestations to one claim, but all deriving from the same original source; and a few attestations to a counter-claim, likewise deriving from a single source. The logic here is obvious: you really have only two competing versions of events each with a single attestation and different numbers of what are effectively echoes of each based on nothing more than the metaphorical volume with which they were asserted.
The matter at hand in that class was reason (or lack thereof) to believe religious claims, with the professor claiming that the widespread popular attestation of a religion does actually give (still quite weak but) greater epistemic justification to that religion than to a less-popular one. But that's unsound reasoning there and equally unsound here, and if even a philosophy professor can't get basic epistemology like this straight I've no hope for the rest of mankind.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Because by saying that you of course suggest the other side of the coin, being that conservatism in the US has shifted towards ignorance, populism and a science-denying base of people with simple solutions to complex problems.
Reminds me of a similar flaw I've loved to point out in some so-called feminist claims that putting emphasis on things like "logic" or "justice" is emphasizing the masculine over the feminine: "really? do you realize you are thereby claiming that logic/justice/etc are unfeminine; that women are illogical/unjust/etc? and you call yourself a feminist?"
Nice catch that conservatives are basically doing the same thing with their attacks on intellectualism: unwittingly claiming willful ignorance as a trait of their side in contrast.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You put Fox ahead of CNN for fake news??? CNN is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of fake news. NYT is pretty fake, but Fox? Meh.
You besmirch a lot of very intellectual anarchists with your association of disinformation and anarchy.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Being "educated" gets you labeled as a liberal because the left has effectively captured the academic world. They have their own superstitions. In many academic quarters, there's a persistent idea that government based on some variation of Marxist theory can be made to work, despite the glaring failures of the 20th Century. Also, Eastern religions are held in high esteem and practices such as Yoga that are associated with it are encouraged. Meanwhile, Christianity and anything associated with it are looked down upon. Anything Western is hated in academia to some extent. Only STEM programs seem to be immune from this insanity. My electives that took me into other departments were always in danger of going off the PC rails.
Yeah, that's what happens when you give governments more power. They use it against you.
Utility is almost never the same provider as telecoms. And there are almost always multiple communications providers. Satellite exists. Wireless mobile service exists. Add cable and POTS and that's 3 or 4 available in lots of places. There are more options if you are creative or motivated.
For electric, there's grid, solar, generator. The grid provider is regulated.
This isn't a single offer. Do you pay a single bill? No.
And unless that's your family land you inherited from your ancestors, you chose to live there.
These are services that are offered. You choose. No authority tells you to make any sort of deal with them. Lots of people no longer have a landline but the telephone police never come to the door to arrest them.
That's the government doing that, because you were gullible enough to give the government power "to protect you from corporations". Surprise! They used it against you instead. Who could have seen that coming?
Don't forget the center
That is a cop out. Just accepting what "the intelligence services" conclude without any actual evidence... when actual UN inspectors on tge ground were visiting sites and not finding anything left of the weapons programs... the intelligence analysts conclusions came down to "Well Saddam used chemical weapons before so he must still have some" and that was reported as fact.
Our free press seems only interested in being intellectually honest and critical of the party line when it suites their own political agenda.
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
What we are living through is a full attack on journalism and truth. Those who are working to that goal seek to create an environment where they can get away unspeakable social atrocities. I remember a time when liars were reviled and never trusted. Today they are given a wink when they pour out alternate facts. Its hard to imagine how a democracy can survive if its voters don't have reliable sources of unbiased facts.
Greed is the root of all evil.
But here is the rub... one of the major fake news promoters was interviewed recently and made it clear he was trying to make up stories that would make right wingers look like fools... to miss this is to miss one of the major goals of this sort of fake news.
Creating the noise of fake news distracts from real critical thinking, real analysis and undermines real debate on issues. And then the next wikileaks dump suddenly gets drowned out by conspiracy theories more bizarre than the actual conspiracy.
Bottom line is that there are real problems in society that need to be sorted out, that could be sorted out by reasonable people and far too many people that profit and make a living on perpetuating problems.
You may want to put more thought into this; there is a multitude of instances where a relationship with a corporation is not 100% voluntary, starting with air and water pollution (treated as externalities), GMOs and control of seeds, takeover of the very government institutions which you talk about, traditionally via lobbyist and now by direct occupation, privatization of the penal system, ISP's selling of your private data...
You may not care about some of all of them, but you cannot speak for me nor others.
There is no legal barrier to a competitor, just financial.
Water, sewer, power, etc are "natural monopolies". Being in a rural area makes it more expensive to provide such services, that is the reality and cost of living in such an area. You could choose to live closer to an urban area where rates are typically lower. If government provided the services you'd pay more than you do now, only in the form of taxes plus whatever rates were set. Additionally, you'd have all the government bureaucratic red tape and uncaring, unelected bureaucrats themselves to deal with. Government is the least-efficient provider of utility services.
If you think the rates are unfair currently then petition the local government utility commission to examine the rates being charged. If they refuse, that's a problem with government. Start a petition, and/or a ballot initiative. Rally support among your neighbors. Show up at city/county board/commission meetings and keep putting the issue before them. Vote-out those who won't listen.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
To be fair, the Christian exercise programme of being nailed to a cross never really took off in most health clubs.....
Trumpist filth? Did you type that from your gilded throne?
I think a huge component of this is untreated paranoid schizophrenia. i remember in Berkeley back in the 70s and 80s, a guy who would stand on the streetcorner, with signs that said Steven King and Alan Cranston (a democratic senator) were connected to mass deaths. images of piled up skulls accompanied the images of the 2 celebrities. he was absolutely sincere, and absolutely insane. many of these paranoid schizophrenics are fairly high functioning, may have mostly severe paranoia and delusions of grandeur/persecution. they can communicate their messages through the internet, and they dont all look completely pasted together. David Icke is the same, he publishes books about the reptiloids (sleestak?), and has a huge following. they KNOW they are right. they arent lying. now, others may use this info to degrade our civil order (like russia), but we have given the tools of mass communication to madmen and madwomen. some of it is just real enough sounding to spread virally. Their rights are way, way too protected for their own good.
If you want a definition for how parent's post is possible, the word is "doublethink"
William Shatner admitted to drinking the blood of children.
There's doctors and Lawyers and other qualified normal people on 4chan. Not just special need kids locked into their parents basements.
Probably more highly educated and competent people visiting /Pol/ than this badly aging Slashdot comment system.
Then I guess if a source tells me a lie, and I know it to be a lie, but I can get a ton of traffic if I write a story about the lie as "truth", then I'm free of any responsibility.
Yay journalism!
You are very delusional if you truly believe anon is anything but a pretend trained expert. You belong there and not here for sure.
Many terrible things in this world that are imaginable are also possible. That's not crazy. Believing in specific and complex scenarios without conclusive and direct evidence is what is crazy. Trying to force an interpretation of the world through a series of undefined symbols and code words is a sign of a dysfunctional logical process. It's actually considered a symptom of schizophrenia.
Lately, politically aligned people of all shades have that attitude. The "Russian" intel espionage goal is to sow disunity and in fighting to weaken the USA's ability in the world theater. Accusations of Russian sympathizing etc fits right in line with that goal, as does refusing to compromise and trying to disrupt the political process. Very ignorant behavior being shown by all sides. I guess you all would rather have the DoD running things?
The "leaks" have gotten out of control. These are truly damning signs that the methods the "intel community" uses to vet and keep their flock loyal and abiding to basic tenets of security is completely flawed. Heads have already started rolling so to speak, it's only a matter of time before they get the right ones. This is what happens when you fill intel with flunkies.
The irony is the real news is more bullshit than these so called paranoid fake news sites.
The plus point is that now I don't need to dig out my DVD of The Day Today and Brass Eye, as real news is more comedy than those ever were.
At least read the first sentence or two in the summary. This 'guy' is named Kate.
Are you assuming xer gender?
But they have supporters all over the globe! They can't all be wrong!
Eat the rich.
He has a point. The message isn't in the facts they are distributing. It's in the fact the message finds eager ears. These truther sites are proof of distrust. Focusing on the nonsens they contain misses the point.
(And opens up rhe discussion about MSM-fault, fueling more distrust)
To me, this just seems like the manifestation of people that need psychological help. Why are we reacting so defensively? Why not focus on studying the psychology of this phenomenon, and see if we can provide help to these people?
Sooo much better than demonizing and assuming the worst.
The NYT is famous for its WMD in Iraq, Saddam is going to attack the US fake news. Fox is packed with fake news. Face it, ever since the the news media turned to click bait journalism (infotainment), the news from the left, right and center is likely to have many fake components, salted with a dash of truth to make it more palatable. The Russians did it (meaning everything bad that ever happens) is the latest in click-bait journalism. Time to boycott the mainstream (fake) press.
Being from the UK, I tend to compare the Daily Mail (right wing nonsense) with the Guardian (left wing nonsense). Whilst I prefer less biased resources, I'd take the Guardian over the Daily Mail any day. The Guardian has less outright lies and is written in a far more eloquent way, there is a minimum level of intelligence required to read the Guardian so they cant simply piss on their readers backs and tell them it's raining like the Daily Mail does which writes for the lowest common denominator.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Please, They have supporters all over the map. The flat map.
I never go to the NYT anymore, they seem like a CIA outlet. I go to the Guardian, but rarely read the main articles because they are so biased in favor of the current power structure. The best news in the US now is from Democracy Now. https://www.democracynow.org/
As long as the news is coming from giant corporations, it is never going to be anything other than "perception management".
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
so this dumb fuck thinks that the gov stories are true and people publishing their own theories is some sort of big problem? fuck you and your stupid "institute of higher learning" you establishment fuckwit. You may be surprised to learn that your strangle hold on learning with your expensive tuition and proprietary books is going the way of the dodo. your ass dragging is part of the reason. don't bother catching up. just keep believing the scum in the government and that your slaveware peddling is education. you will be out of work soon enough and you can start to think about the world around you while you live in your car.
The forces of disinformation are neither liberal nor conservative. They are anarchists.
Propaganda is used by all ideologies.
Err.. when does Hitler invading Poland a "false flag"? I did invade it while pretending to be the Wehrmacht (German Army), no one else. This act triggered WW2. A false flag would be the Bay of Tonkin event (the Aug. 4th one), when North Vietnamese never actually exchanged fire with US Navy.
I love how all the on topic replies from side often labeled "fake-news" are rated -1; this is the flip side of many moderation systems.
Can we really be described as owning these sources (our)?
http://www.saddapet.com where you can buy dogs online with orignal breed
Thanks, Some days it would be better NOT to have the ability to cut and paste.
Someone had to do it.
Where's my hand basket?
I have a trip I'm going to take.
The suckers are doing a better job of destroying the Tea Party than anyone outside could have. "Useful idiots" works for me :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Your example is contrived, and has NOTHING to do with bullshit detection. You also fail to understand that self-determination is a right, not just a privilege reserved for the cognoscenti. People have a right to be willfully stupid, as long as they are willing to pay the consequences of their willful ignorance. Same as they have the right to euthanasia, suicide, abortion, sex change, divorce, same-sex partners, polygamy, polyandry, and group families, and everything else under the name of personal autonomy - "my body, my choice." If 10 people decide to form a "family" and raise all their children together as one family unit, you have no say in the matter.
The only justification for intervention is when it manifestly negatively affects others who have not consented, or individuals who cannot consent, such as children. Let the morons vote for Trump - as predicted, they are destroying the Tea Partiers and other extremists in the GOP from inside - something that their opponents could never do.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That's maybe how your brain works, addled academic that you are. Maybe you should spend less time on Twitter.
And yet there have been only some fringe references and no actual, real, solid, way to benefit from it. So if all these people are in the knowing then you do not see it reflected in the Establishment... Why should people trust media? There is more, but this case is peremptory, though in a way it is TOO LATE: when you are ready to go full lights but instead find funniness in dealing with it... one decade later you do not want to be annoyed that much with it. But people already perceived the wasted importance and wondered... what about other news they hear or know of but are too destabilizing to be actually acknowledged by politically correct news?
The left are now at the "left pole" where anyone who disagrees in any part with their narrative is "extreme right".
Makes it harder to judge the good right from the bad right, but it also makes it hard to take the left seriously.
A rule of thumb I now have for mainstream media is: Question everything. Don't take anything at face value. Assume incompetence at best and misinformation at worst. When an article comes up that you are interested in, ignore all the editorialising and listen for the facts. Most of the time you won't hear any, but even if you do, start researching online. Get the facts, find the evidence; do journalism, because it's been a long time since mainstream media has done any.
Another good clue to fake news is when you only get one side of the story. Whenever that happens you can be sure it's fake. When you heart both then it may or may not have a strong bias. Check the stated bias of the outlet or the reporter. If they claim no bias, there is likely to be fake elements. If they claim a bias, that is a good start, but then you need to take that bias into account.